Switch Datacenters - March 2023

SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGIES AND GETTING THE PUBLIC BOARD

SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGIES GETTING PUBLIC

Switch Datacenters shares its strategy for reversing the industry’s reputation, garnering public support and cementing a presence in the Amsterdam market

When it comes to public opinion, data centres are among the industries that face the biggest of uphill battles. The sector – and not always without good reason – has long been perceived as the antagonist of the world’s sustainability targets. And now, this long-standing reputation is proving a major obstacle to the growth of the sector.

Despite the fact that the data centre industry is full of pioneering sustainability advocates, each of whom is developing sophisticated, future-proof, green solutions, it’s still a challenge to reverse the state of public opinion.

So, how can companies that are leading the charge towards a greener future establish the right reputation in their marketplace and successfully demonstrate their sustainability commitment to the public?

In an exclusive interview with Edgar Van Essen, Managing Director of Switch Datacenters, we learned about how the company is deploying unrivalled green initiatives and ensuring those efforts don’t go unnoticed.

EDGAR VAN ESSEN

TITLE: MANAGING DIRECTOR

COMPANY: SWITCH DATACENTERS

Van Essen joined Switch Datacenters five years ago as Managing Director and - together with Gregor Snip (CEO & Co-Founder) - is responsible for the strategic, daily growth of the company.

Before joining Switch Datacenters, Van Essen was an Executive Vice President leading a large region for a renowned Swiss high tech company.

Van Essen has a long and successful track record in building out the digital infrastructural markets in EMEA, and has been very successful in implanting new growth strategies across Europe. He holds a Master Degree in Business from Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, and is driven by innovation and smart new business models.

Expanding and evolving in the Amsterdam data centre market

Switch Datacenters is an Amsterdambased data centre provider that has been at the forefront of the region’s sustainability focus for the last 15 years.

EXECUTIVE BIO

moved into large hyperscale and wholesale site development. We’re not known to everybody, and we like to keep it that way,” explains Van Essen.

“We are not shouting from the rooftops what we do – that doesn't help us in our plans to get the right locations and the right new sites in Amsterdam. So we have a deliberately low profile, but in Amsterdam, we know every street, and every potential building that we could turn into a data centre.

Every year, Switch develops new data centres and adds to its expanding portfolio.

“So we have more than 120MW of data centre capacity in development in Amsterdam. But, when we have bigger customers on board, we might also follow them abroad,” Van Essen adds.

“Our role in the Dutch data centre market is to be the challenger. We’re coming from a relatively small position in retail and, over the last three years, have succesfully

The company was founded to address what they saw as a gap in the market and bring a new approach to the industry.

“Switch Datacenters started 15 years ago by

“Our role in the Dutch data centre market is to be the challenger and innovator”

EDGAR VAN ESSEN MANAGING DIRECTOR, SWITCH DATACENTERS

There’s no trade-off for data centres and sustainability

Schneider Electric’s Thierry Chamayou explains why sustainability is a strategic imperative for the data centre industry

THIERRY CHAMAYOU, VICE PRESIDENT CLOUD & SERVICE PROVIDERS EMEA, SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

“Within the last few years sustainability has moved from a ‘nice to have’, to one of the top three procurement considerations for end-users and operators.” says Schneider Electric’s Vice President, Cloud Service Providers, EMEA, Thierry Chamayou.

Schneider Electric, who has signed the 17 science-based targets that form the foundation of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals has made sustainability a fundamental focus of its operations, positioning itself as one of the world’s leading authorities on net zero. Today the company develops technologies for several critical sectors, including buildings, grids, industrial manufacturing, and of course, data

centres. It is here that Chamayou believes data centres are leading the charge and demonstrating that energyintensive industries can be a key enabler for decarbonisation.

Sustainability has indeed become a strategic imperative for data centres, and for businesses embarking on this journey, Schneider Electric is leading by exampleestablishing new innovations and investing significant amounts of revenue in research and development. Chamayou tells us that the company is not only helping organisations improve efficiency and reduce emissions, but is helping business to establish strategies that will enable long-term, sustainable change.

A key example is its position as a leader in the Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) market, where it was recently ranked No. 1 for its NEO Network and Zeigo platforms. These acquisitions have enabled Schneider Electric to simplify the buying process by connecting customers with trusted experts, and offering exclusive market intelligence to accelerate decision making.

Chamayou tells us that there is “no trade-off”, and sustainability is not just good for the planet, it’s now become a central of focus for organisations both in the industry and outside of it. Many businesses, for example, are becoming more climate-conscious, and as such, making significant investments in Greentech to futureproof and safeguard their operations.

In the data centre sector specifically, sustainability has been driven by enduser requirements, pushing operators to measure and prove their environmental impact in a multitude of ways. “One way in which the company is helping here is through its industry-first sustainability framework”, says Chamayou, “helping operators to measure their impact through five key areas – energy, greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), water, waste, land and biodiversity.”

For Schneider, these are vital, as they give data centre organisations fixed and quantifiable metrics for them to measure their progress towards improved sustainability standards.

“Ultimately, creating sustainable change comes down to setting a bold and actionable strategy,” continues Chamayou, “but no two strategies are entirely alike. Each customer will define its ambition in terms of climate impact, and we take a data-driven approach to help them drive change. To do that, we use our global platform with suites of different software, called EcoStruxure™.”

One example is EcoStruxure’s Resource Advisor, which enables customers to unlock greater optimisation, while giving them access to the analytics and reporting tools that are critical to the first phase of improving sustainability. For data centres in particular, this level of transparency and measurability is invaluable.

Interestingly Schneider Electric’s efforts within the space coincide with the publication of several of its recent research papers. One example is ‘Sustainability at the Edge’, exploring the gap between enterprise plans and edge sustainability programs. One of the report’s key findings was the revelation of a ‘perception-versus-reality dilemma’ across much of the industry.

According to the report, “the maturity evaluations of nearly half of respondents (48%) did not match a previous answer,” as many enterprise organisations believe their sustainability programmes are more advanced than they are, in-reality. What’s more, the paper found that 73% of organisations surveyed ranked sustainability as their second-most important business priority. Critically, only 33% say they have created a strategic sustainability plan.

Chamayou tells us that having clear, definable metrics that data centres can use to shape their sustainability strategies will be an immense aid. Through its framework, technologies and expertise, Schneider Electric is helping the industry to create datadriven strategies, where success and progress are measurable.

coincidence, because Gregor (CEO) and his brother were running the first hosting company in the Netherlands.

“They felt really mistreated on pricing, flexibility and customisation. So they decided, typically entrepreneurially, to just build a data centre themselves. They had no clue what it was, but they did that, improved their designs over the years and, actually, they succeeded in doing so.”

From there, Gregor and his brother spent a lot of time optimising their technology and innovating in the data centre space.

“They achieved this not just by buying everything that was on catalogue, but by actually thinking for themselves what they needed and reinventing smarter and better

“We have totally forgotten to understand that we have to actually adapt our language to the language of the public and give something back to them”

EDGAR VAN ESSEN MANAGING DIRECTOR, SWITCH DATACENTERS

solutions. In the end, this led to very efficient solutions that we developed ourselves and in-depth knowledge on cooling systems, modular design, construction and energy efficiency.

“Today, Switch still has a natural focus on independent development. We have a lot of engineers that have a thorough background in industrial design, meaning we have all the knowledge in-house that we need.”

30MW Switch Datacenters currently operates around 30MW of IT data centre capacity

“At this point in time, we’re one of the best at finding and developing new plots – and we do this in a totally different way to a lot of our competitors. The reason we are good at this is because we focus on Amsterdam, and we know the Amsterdam market inside-out. We know the language, we know the politics, we know how to get the power, and we know the right areas for new locations.”

And now, after almost two decades spent establishing its presence in the Dutch market, Switch’s next goal is to utilise its learnings, grow even bigger in Amsterdam and perhaps strategically expand across the continent.

“So we decided, ‘Let's first build a strong base in Amsterdam and, once we have that base and we have those customers on board, we will replicate that model in other countries’.”

Switch Datacenters and Schneider Electric – building the sustainable data centers of the future

Switch Datacenters was founded in 1998 and is one of the most sustainable data center operators and developers in Amsterdam. Today it owns three data centers in the Netherlands, and provides premium hosting, colocation and connectivity services for cloud, retail, and government organizations.

Sustainability is embedded within Switch Datacenters’ DNA and it believes that data centers can be reliable, affordable, innovative, and sustainable, all at the same time. Its locations in Amsterdam also places it within a global trade hub, while its position within the FLAP-D market makes it one of the world’s most competitive regions for data centers and cloud providers. Sustainability and innovation have, therefore, become key differentiators for Switch Datacenters, and are vital to its leadership position.

For more than a decade Switch Datacenters and Schneider Electric have established a long-term, strategic partnership to build an efficient, adaptive, and resilient data center platform. Across its portfolio, Switch Datacenters has worked with Schneider Electric to design and build its data centers, and today it uses turnkey solutions from Schneider Electric's EcoStruxure™ for Data Centers architecture to deliver marketleading services.

Switch Datacenters designed its facilities primarily to minimalize the impact of CO2 emissions on the environment and it was the first data center operator in Europe to reduce its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) to 1.1 by using revolutionary cooling concepts and innovative liquid cooling solutions.

From a power and resilience perspective, Switch Datacenters uses Schneider Electric Galaxy™ VX UPS with LithiumIon, which offers up to 99% energy efficiency using Schneider Electric’s patented eConversion technology, and critical powertrain solutions including its Busbar and Medium Voltage (MV) panel technologies.

The collaboration between Switch Datacenters and Schneider Electric has resulted in an initial 30% initial cost savings and 25% greater energy efficiency, enabling Switch Datacenters to meet today’s demands for industry-leading uptime and sustainability, and provision for a sustainable future.

Learn more

Paralleling global developments – the challenges of the Amsterdam market

According to Van Essen, the Amsterdam market is a particularly difficult one for data centres.

“The main challenges in the Amsterdam market are mainly about sustainability and getting power and permits. There's a lot of political pressure in this regard, and I think it all comes back to the public not understanding what data centres are about,” Van Essen explains.

Continuing in this vein, he asserts that one of the industry’s key flaws lies in the fact that its leaders and innovators are talking exclusively in technical language. This mode of communication is actually creating a big gap, because politicians aren’t engineers, and the general public are unable to follow these explanations. As a result, those outside the

EDGAR VAN ESSEN MANAGING DIRECTOR, SWITCH DATACENTERS

“ This optimisation game – data centre 1.0, as I call it – was very technologyoriented and not at all society-aware. That is actually what caused a lot of frustration in Amsterdam with the policymakers and the public”

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industry are becoming increasingly alienated from – and therefore mistrusting of – it.

“We have totally forgotten that we have to actually adapt our language to the language of the public and, when using scarce resources like land, power etc, give something back to the public,” Van Essen explains. “I also think a lot went wrong there, specifically, after a lot of foreign capital came to Amsterdam and adopted a one-size-fits-all push out of their US headquarters.”

For many global enterprises, Van Essen says a ‘copy-paste’ approach across all their new locations is common. However, this can be a serious hindrance to efficiency, and be highly detrimental to a brand reputation and a reason for slow innovation.

“This optimisation game – data centre 1.0, as I call it – was very technologyoriented and not at all society-aware.

That is actually what caused a lot of frustration in Amsterdam with both policymakers and the public, and it is now also becoming a broader European topic.”

“Amsterdam was one of the first cities that started to block the growth of data centres because, actually, they were consuming too much space and power, which were meant for other things. In the end, the industry was very much the root cause of creating this block, and you see the same happening now in Frankfurt, and even in London and Dublin.”

Unexpectedly, Van Essen says that because Amsterdam has always been leading this trend towards high sustainability demands, that has proven to be a major advantage of developing solutions there.

“Once you have a working solution in Amsterdam, the chance that you can copypaste it into Frankfurt, Dublin, and the others is pretty high. If you start the other way around – develop something in London and then try to get into Amsterdam – the likelihood that you will fail is pretty big,” Van Essen asserts.

“Amsterdam was one of the first cities that started to block the growth of data centres because, actually, they were consuming too much space and power”

EDGAR VAN ESSEN MANAGING DIRECTOR, SWITCH DATACENTERS

We can’t ignore the future

One of the biggest challenges for MTDC’s and their Cloud Scale tenants is that they must think about the infrastructure requirements in terms of workloads rather than in space and power.

To meet future scalability and bandwidth demands, Cloud service providers must have the ability to rapidly deploy any type of workload at any required network speed, at any time, and at any location.

As a result, we see Cloud Type Data Centers rapidly evolving, as data speeds, power usage per rack, and infrastructure complexity increase.

This requires smarter than ever Data Center designs. From smart power and cooling techniques and designs to smart and future ready high speed fiber infrastructure designs, from the entrance room in the grey space to and in-between the equipment and storage racks in the white space.

The objectives of a fiber infrastructure design are comparable to those for designing a highway. To meet current and future traffic demands it needs to be safe, efficient and allows for fast movement of traffic. Next to that overall cost, maintenance, sustainability, and planning for anticipated future traffic must be considered.

In an ideal world the MTDC’s and their Cloud Scale tenants would like to have a fiber infrastructure that can easily be migrated to higher speeds in the most sustainable way and at lowest CAPEX and OPEX thinkable. No matter if you’re on a 100G, 2 fiber backbone today and want to migrate to a 400G or 800G 8 or 16 fiber tomorrow or if you already think about 1.6TB backbone, the solution is already there.

Interested in hearing more about a solution that has ultra-low loss connectivity, is highly modular, has minimum weight, allows for one person install, is sustainable and drives cost and efficiency let us know.

Contact

Bas Mondria Sales Manager EMEA bas.mondria@commscope.com

Dick Philips Sr. Manager Global Cloud Accounts EMEA dick.philips@commscope.com

“So, it's all about understanding what is the best spot to start developing a new data centre formula. And we are 100% convinced that Amsterdam is the perfect ground for that. Not only due to the size of the market, but also the political environment we are in.”

120MW+

Switch Datacenters has more than 120MW of data centre capacity in development in Amsterdam

Communicating sustainability –how to get the public on-board So, the twofold challenge becomes implementing future-proof sustainable solutions, while also communicating those efforts to clients and the public. As Van Essen states, preserving the industry requires nothing short of a new reputation.

“What we really now need to see happening, very quickly, is for the hyperscalers to start adapting their operational data centre technology models to actually become much more green by nature,” he urges.

“If they still build new, huge land-consuming data centres designed on air cooling, the situation will never change. So we will really call on the hyperscalers and the forwardlooking companies to start implementing alternative cooling technologies and start looking at site redevelopment, rather than builing new ones from scratch.”

Despite being a relatively small industry player, Switch is renowned for being a major presence on the sustainability stage and a key voice in these global discussions.

“We have been a very active member of all the forward-looking innovation committees in the global industry for many years, and try to contribute there as much as we can. We've been very active in the Open Compute Platform, for instance; we're also one of the founding members of the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance and a member of the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact.”

To help drive innovation further in the sector, Switch even opened up one of its Amsterdam data centres as a test batch for new sustainable technologies.

“We said, ‘If you guys want to see how this works and try it out, come to us, and we will actually help you to develop your solutions’. Already, we have quite a number of forward-looking companies coming to us because they want to do something with liquid cooling, reusing heat or using refurbished equipment.”

“They naturally come to us now: we understand their way of thinking, and we actually facilitate their division models. And that's

“It's all about understanding what is the best spot to start developing a new data centre formula. And we are 100% convinced that Amsterdam is the perfect ground for that”

EDGAR VAN ESSEN MANAGING DIRECTOR, SWITCH DATACENTERS

totally different if you go to the big names – we take the opposite approach to them. We say, ‘Please come to us and, jointly, we will find the next level’.”

For instance, experimenting with reusing server heat is a key part of those activities. For Switch, reusing the heat generated by its servers is an essential part of both futureproofing tech design, and preparing its customers for new business models and sustainability legislation in the future.

Switch’s long-term ambition is that data centres will eventually become heating

plants for district heating, thereby helping cities, policy makers and utility providers to move away from the current fossil fuel heat plants much more quickly.

“Data centres will no longer be seen as enemies of the people, and will contribute to wider society in a much smarter way. And that's what we call data centre 2.0.”

It is through these market differentiators that Switch has been able to establish a unique, immensely strong relationship with its network of partners.

“Our partners see that we're the odd one out – the new kids on the block, in a certain way. They’re also seeing that we're growing quite substantially. So, now, we are really on a lot of innovation calls with really big suppliers,” Van Essen explains.

“They start to understand what we're doing, why we’re doing it, and see the value of our approach, that actually brings us into very strong strategic alliances. Despite the fact that we don’t yet have the volumes of the really large data centres, we still get the same level of board attention, because we bring much more to the table than just volume.”

In this way, Switch is adopting a multifaceted, intuitive approach to sustainability, bringing all the required elements together, while successfully showing the public that data centres can have a place in our greener future.

“It's all about understanding where the public opinion is heading to understand new things around the corner that will impact your business. It is absolutely not technology alone that defines our future. It's much more about understanding society and contributing to society – and that's where we differ from the rest.”

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